Royal Commission for the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, 1851.
The official descriptive and illustrated catalogue of “the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, 1851”. Commissioner’s Copy.
This, the most splendid exhibition ever assembled, was mounted in Hyde Park in what was to become Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace. It was divided into four main sections: raw materials, machinery and mechanical inventions, manufactures, and sculpture and the plastic arts, and its massive catalogue forms an unrivalled source of information on the world’s industrial arts in the middle of the last century.
Only one hundred and thirty special presentation copies of the full catalogue, magnificently bound, were made, almost all as gifts for the Queen, Prince Albert, other royal households, foreign governments, cabinet ministers and the like. They are in consequence exceedingly rare. The present set is the personal copy of the Secretary to the Commission, the architect Matthew Digby Wyatt.
The reports of the juries which accompany the catalogue are illustrated with Fox Talbot’s calotype photographs.
5 reels
Reference: CGE
Contents
| Reel | Description |
| 1 | Official descriptive and illustrated catalogue |
| Three volumes containing many hundreds of lithographic plates and text illustrations | |
| Volume 1. Classes 1 – 10 | |
| 2 | Volume 2. Classes 11 – 30 |
| Miscellaneous objects | |
| The colonies | |
| 3 | Volume 3. Foreign states |
| Reports of the juries on the subjects of the thirty classes into which the exhibition was divided. Four volumes (1852). Note: these “Reports” include one hundred and fifty four calotypes and one lithograph. Gernsheim, in his “History of Photography” (1969, page 174) states that “the negatives of these Crystal Palace photographs had been taken by C.M. Ferrier of Paris on albumenized glass plates, and Hugh Owen of Bristol by a calotype-process” | |
| 4 | Reports of the juries on the subjects of the thirty classes into which the exhibition was divided. Volumes 2 and 3 |
| 5 | Reports of the juries on the subjects of the thirty classes into which the exhibition was divided. Volume 4 |
| First (second) report of the commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851, to the Right Honourable Spencer Horatio Walpole (Home Secretary); bound with supplement to the official descriptive and illustrated catalogue | |
| Supplement to the first report of the commissioners, containing engravings of the medals and certificates prepared too late for insertion in their proper places (containing seven steel engraved plates) |